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@Henri Why, I have asked a specific question with specific requirements for a best answer. If I had left the requirements more open-ended I'd make it cWiki but I intentionally focused it because I'm looking for something in particular. IE, this question has an objective answer and therefore doesn't need to be made a community wiki.
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 1:14

@Evan Plaice I am just following @Senseful's tagging convention that he took up from superuser for questions that entail asking for recommendations/alternatives. In this case a recommendation for a social networking site. This way these questions that ask for specific requirements instead of a List of <X> do not necessarily have to be Cw, see meta, you can remove it if you do not think this is the case.
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phwd♦Jul 8 '10 at 14:05

1

@Evan Plaice: I agree, with those specific requirements this question should not be CW. Consider making this more clear by putting this information in earlier and in an explicit way. For example in the first sentence and/or the title.
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Peter MortensenJul 13 '10 at 15:44

We already have a rudimentary
prototype of Diaspora running on our
machines, and are working like mad to
make it all we can be. Our current
implementations include GPG
encryption, scraping Twitter and
Flickr, awesome design aesthetics, and
the initial stages of connection
infrastructure (“friending” other
Diaspora instances).

first sprint.

It is our one and only goal to get
Diaspora in the hands of every man,
woman, and child at summer’s end.
September 2010 will signify the
release of the project in its first
iteration, fully open-sourced under
the AGPL. This release will be
comprised of several key features for
Diaspora, mainly:

Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)

End to end GPG External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)

Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation

Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

second sprint.

Once the core application is finished,
we will focus on extending Diaspora,
unleashing a battery of add-on modules
and updates to the core system with
the open-source community. We will
migrate back to New York City to set
up house, and will devise plans to
make it even easier for the general
public to utilize Diaspora, a la a
dead-simple, five-minute setup. Like
the first sprint, the second sprint
will also be all about reclaiming all
that is us.

flooring it to 88mph.

The future will offer a multitude of
amazing new capabilities for Diaspora.
A taste of what’s floating around in
our heads right now:

OpenID

Voice-over IP Distributed

Encrypted Backups

Instant Messaging protocol

UDP integration

The following are the official Diaspora demo instances, which will be wiped of all content at regular and unpredictable intervals:

What is oStatus?

oStatus is emerging as the main protocol that will support distributed social networking.
It's a collection of other technologies that enable the distributed social web.

webfinger - for finding friends, openid, service discovery etc.

salmon protocol - for making sure comments on one site flow to back upstream to their originators.

PubSubHubBub - a webhook protocol for distributing messages.

ActivityStreams - an extension to RSS/Atom to represent things like "Bob published this photo"

PortableContacts - Secure address books and friends list.

You seem like someone who will want distributed social networking as it let's the marketplace combat the lock-in power of the network effect Facebook has. Right now, it's hard to leave Facebook because everyone is on it. Once the dam bursts with oStatus, it will be much easier to leave any social networking site without leaving your social network. This sets up a marketplace and ecology where sites will compete on features, security, and privacy for your membership - but they don't get to hold you hostage.

The root cause of our discontent with most social networks - be they myspace or facebook or orkut or whatever, is the power differential. If facebook or myspace decide to do something you don't like, you can't leave because your social network is locked into that site. Making the whole thing distributed means you can change your provider - just like you can change your ISP or email provider.

Great answer, I'll definitely upvote it as soon as I can vote again. The platform looks very promising and looks like it has a pretty good track record on Status.net. If you look @ the Diaspora project it will be implement some of the protocols of oStatus. See status.net/wiki/Diaspora
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 17:19

I didn't mention them as they were brought up earlier, but yes. Upvote (future) appreciated! The diaspora guys have been working closely with the ostatus folks and seem to buy into the webhook model as well.
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Matt KatzJul 8 '10 at 19:37

I'm really happy to see this option move up the list. Even though it doesn't necessarily cover all of my requirements I personally think it has the most traction to becoming the next step in social networking. I've added a 50 point because I agree and you have provided a lot of good info here. Keep it up
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Evan PlaiceFeb 11 '11 at 20:47

+1 good answer. But how does it match up with my requirements?
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Evan PlaiceJul 7 '10 at 23:46

Thanks for the update. Being someone who has never used Orkut this helps a lot.
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Evan PlaiceJul 9 '10 at 7:44

Huge here in India too. Let me tell you one thing, I was regular Orkut user once. I stopped using it since the day I started using Facebook. Sorry to say it anyway. The UI design is hideous.
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blntechieJul 9 '10 at 12:57

Not stupid micro-web-app integration
like Mafia and Farmville Be gone Zynga!

Granular privacy controls so I can
control who is allowed to see what
content Err... I think right now if you make your own network that is your privacy. Then the up level to that is to add a person in your network as your friend

Advertisements are fine as long as
they aren't too obtrusive - Google Ads ok ?

Now the catch. There is some talk of Ning giving up their free networks (it has been free for some time)

Even with privacy settings set to the max that doesn't stop FB from farming out my personal data to their advertisers. The first time I saw my personal profile show up in Google I was done with FB. You say that everybody is on FB, well, everybody used to be on MySpace too.
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 2:53

2

The difference between e.g. Google and FB is how their business interests align or dis-align with users interests. Facebook needs your private information and social graph become accessible to third parties. Google does not: they want to serve you better ads and make sure you use Web more. Google wants to use what they know about to talk back to you. FB wants to sell your info to 3rd parties. Putting into extreme - in Google, you are user. In Facebook, you are item in catalog.
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Miro A.Jul 9 '10 at 20:55

+1 Thanks for the suggestion. That's too bad it's getting passed around by capital investment guys. Usually that means someone with more money than sense thinks they're going to compete by copying the already existing dominant platform. The only good thing to come from that is it will fractionalize facebook even faster and hasten its downfall. ;)
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 1:59

I think AOL bought it as a Facebook-killer a few years back and have now sold it on to a (Russian?) company at a huge loss... goodness knows what these next guys have planned! :)
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x3jaJul 8 '10 at 2:34

Mega spam bot? That's what the Ruskies are best known for.
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 4:03

yes, AOL bought it for ~$850M, sold it for less than $10M. Bebo's traffic dropped 50% year-on-year and is only going to continue going one way...
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iAnJul 8 '10 at 9:10

It's hard to believe that Kevin Rose is so out of touch with the current state of social networking. Google already has a competing social networking platform to Facebook. It's called Orkut, see webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1912/…. Orkut pretty much dominates the social networking space in Brazil and India but it never really gained critical mass in the US or Europe.
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 6:18

+1 scratch the last comment about Kevin Rose. I googled it ::sigh:: and found a news post in pcmag that talks a little more about it. Thanks for the heads-up. Personally, I can't say that I'm too excited about the prospect of Google attempting to break into the social networking space again. Here's the link to the article pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2366027,00.asp
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 6:31

Well, if you judge by Google's success rate up to date, neither of the "social" things except YouTube was exactly a glaring success. Neither Wave nor Buzz did take over the world ... We will see how this one goes
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Miro A.Jul 8 '10 at 17:08

1

-1 because it's just an unconfirmed rumor. Not a viable alternative.
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davrJul 10 '10 at 0:11

1

Now might be the time to update this answer ;)
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Patrik BjörklundJul 3 '11 at 7:39

+1 thanks for the suggestion. How does it fit into the list of requirements? I haven't looked at it in detail but it looks like just another microblogging clone of FB, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc...
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 1:19

Have you considered using your own site to host your material and using a social network, for example, facebook connect or google friend connect, to do the social network part of the site ( for example commenting )

Yes, but I'd rather not waste the time and effort to re-invent the wheel. Plus, I'm not just trying use as just a component of a site. I'm looking for a central landing page to gain access to all of the third-party social sites in one place. webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1912/… is about the closest working implementation I've seen so far.
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Evan PlaiceJul 8 '10 at 6:14

There's something Microsoft have been pushing for a while, which I only assume never picked up - Windows Live Spaces. I think it has most of the features you mention, but I'm not 100% sure about all of them, especially the parts about integration.

Take a look at The Fridge which is some sort of another kind of social network. It focuses around groups of people. Persons that are not in this group cannot see any information out of it (and don't even see that this group exists).